The Flâneur's Turtle

By Gina Marie Disalvo, RMU Student.

This one time, at band camp, my friend hijacked an elevator and had a disco. Seriously. In order to use the elevator, you had to boogie with the best of ‘em. These shenanigans continued for a few hours and even moved into the dorm lobby. Non-stop disco; bands from all over the country joined in and it turned into a regular old Saturday Night Fever. This…this is why marching band; because at the end of the day everyone wants to belong. Everyone spends high school searching for their place; whether it is sports, drama, academics, or music. Some of us find it, some of us don’t. What I can tell you is that marching band changed my life, and I can’t even play an instrument.

I spent years in other activities. Cheerleading, girl scouts, pageants; I tried my hand at horses, archery, fishing, and even jousting. Okay, I am just kidding about the jousting. But seriously, singing and dancing were the only things I really enjoyed. Both required no team or group effort. You see, kids are cruel and being a tomboy on a cheerleading team can lead to some nasty name calling and seclusion issues. It doesn’t matter that I had been to nationals more times than most of them could count. They hated me on principle. I’m not the only kid who had this problem; sometimes mean girls and boys decide it’s a great idea to pick on the people who are different. So after eleven years of hard work, and seven national titles, I quit cheerleading. I walked away from the team of fifty people who made being a human being feel like terrible curse.

I walked onto a team of eight. Eight girls, all from very different backgrounds, who decided, let’s try something new. I joined my high school’s color guard.

Color guard are the people with the flags and the rifles that make the marching band look pretty. We dance, and twirl and do all sorts of cool stuff. I learned a lot in color guard. We competed, and won State. That though, isn’t what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to say, reader, is that these girls were the most accepting people I had ever met. We all had each other’s backs, even if we weren’t friends, because at the end of the day we were a team. In the group of fifty girls I couldn’t find a single one who cared as much as these eight girls. The best part though was that they didn’t just come with themselves; they came with an entire marching band attached. It was the band family. The director was the parent, the winds/brass were teenagers, the percussion were the children. Seriously though, these people made up a group that made you feel at home. For some of us growing up, it was the closest to home we ever felt. The most accepted and loved, and the bonds made in this one, or four seasons, changed lives, and made life worth living.

So, ‘this one time at band camp’, is a big joke right? But seriously, this one time, at band camp, I found the best family I’ve ever known.